Innocence: Unschuld

This co-written essay explores the concept of innocence in "Fate and Character" by Walter Benjamin, as part of a special issue on Benjamin's 1919 essay. We begin with a discussion of Benjamin's later text "Conversation Above the Corso: Recollections of Carnival-Time in Nice" (1935), in which Benjamin remarks that the exaggerated figures at carnival have a relation to innocence, which in turn has a relation to childhood. In "Fate and Character," innocence is harder to pin down: Benjamin writes that it "floats away." Innocence in the essay appears fleetingly, as, we argue, "a gaseous, transitory bi-product of an inquiry that has other ends." For Benjamin, we suggest, innocence is not simply an a priori or natural state, nor is it oppositional to guilt, but something produced through creativity.